Friday, October 7, 2011

Last night the moon was this swollen burnt orange, like a pumpkin pie left in the oven too long, little spots of char on the thick custard surface, with a chunk scooped out of the top of it, and it hung 7 times it's size on the edge of the city. The closer I got to it, driving on the empty shoreway towards home, the bigger it got, until I thought just as I entered the downtown highway bends that my chest might burst with the weight of it.

I stopped by the 24 hour grocery store to buy cat food. I had been gone all day, and left the cats the very dregs of the last bag 14 hours ago. It just seemed cruel to say I was too tired and fucked up and I just wanted to fall asleep, and therefore they had to wait until late the next morning when I finally dragged myself out of bed. The grocery store at 3am was completely empty. My feet were sore in my boots, and my toes burned at the hard linoleum floors. The cat food was on the complete far end of the store, which is a huge one. I walked through aisles and aisles of junk food and cans and freezers, a million loafs of bread sitting there waiting in the darkness, having come hundreds of miles to sit sterile in their plastic wrappers. I thought to myself that one thing I should do is start going into 24 hour stores at 3am and taking photos. I think I might.

I felt an incredible swell of power as I walked out of the store, towards my car, the only car in the parking lot right in the middle of the vast asphalt space. The wind was 70 degrees and blew up my skirt, the plastic bag with cat food and body wash heaving and swinging against my leg, and it feels really good to be an adult sometimes alive in this time and in this place.

I stopped to get coffee, and introduced myself finally to the woman Kathy who always makes my coffee at dunkin donuts at 3am. I figured after a year of this, it was finally time to try and be a good customer. After all, that woman has seen me in every possible conceivable state of decrepitude - glowing and pretty after dates, crying and mascara streaked after fights, tired and serious after long days, blasting a hundred different kinds of things after shows. Always alone, always at 3am, always on my phone waiting at the window. Sometimes paying with credit cards, sometimes 50s, sometimes a bunch of nickels and dimes. Kathy knows me better than all of you.

Sarah and I went to the famous cemetery Monday. It rained lightly on us, which was appropriate, and we walked around in the mud, drove thru the far away sections listening to Leonard Cohen, because we had to, its a cemetery after all. We looked at the giant groves of obelisks, the massive stone urns folded and draped, the mausoleums standing almost humble in rows. Rich people are crazy, cemeteries prove that. All the founding father names of Cleveland, batshit insane. Who thinks to spend thousands of dollars on sculptures just to memorialize themselves? I mean, rich people, they always do. It's the thing you can count on, since the beginning of civilization. I'm frankly just waiting for the day some billionaire builds himself a pyramid in Utah. I'm frankly just a little ashamed it hasn't happened yet. I'm disappointed in modern billionaires.

We saw them just as we had decided to leave. I spotted them out of the corner of my eye off the main road. She thought they were gravestones at first, there were a lot of carved animals stones, they were sitting so impossibly still. I thought they would run as soon as the car came towards them, but they just lay there in the drizzle watching us. The smaller ones in the back looked a little nervous, but the big one, the leader, didn't twitch, or even move his head to follow the motion of us. They were so huge. Huge and solid with muscle and fast, you could see the fastness in them even completely still, it vibrated in the air around them.

7 comments:

That place is magic. I can tell you how magic since it raised me. I've kissed boys in that place, and wrote bad teenage poetry dressed in combat boots and black lace dresses from the 20s. I can smell it from my parents' house, it's that close. We crawled it as teenagers, into the wee hours, jumping fences like monkeys off the main street, and knowing it so well that we could navigate it by memorization, not sight, in the moonless dark. I know a lot of secrets there. If you lean in closely, I'll whisper them in your ear.

I often see these guys (and gals, and sometimes their Bambies) on my run through the woods, and almost every time, none of them even flinch. I like that. It's like they're saying: fuck you, you fucking idiot running for nothing...why would we be scared of YOU?

Loved Swine's comments... in the provincial town that I once jogged 'round, there were a trio of deer that would come every winter on their way to wherever... I though something along the lines of Swine's thoughts...

Sorry I haven't been around... will I 'excavate and educate'..? Prolly but I won't pester you with comments... that is, provided you don't drag me by my fingernails to the keyboard...

I once took a French girl there to show her what I said was the best view of the city. We weren't on a date, but from her pale reaction I thought I might have been better off taking her to a slaughterhouse. She didn't want to hear about the assassinated president, didn't pay more than a passing glance at the sublime cityscape, and said virtually nothing the rest of the day.

Rich folks are insane. It's as if they can't stop competing with the rest of us, even when it can't possibly mean a shit to them anymore. All their wealth makes them angrier than the rest of us at the thought of there being a great equalizer. The grim reaper is a damn socialist.

I once read the words of a famously rich woman who said something to this effect: "I want to be so rich that I can't stand my fellow human beings anymore." If anyone deserves a pyramid in Las Vegas, it's her, and we know what to inscribe as her epitaph: the bald truth about rich fucks everywhere.

"What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while...What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though." - J. D. Salinger